CHAPTER 6

“Sweetie…I…I want to be with you,” she whispered. She held the picture in her left hand, and hugged it to her breast, crying. She used her right sleeve of her hoodie to wipe the tears away from her face. In the reflection of the framed picture, she could see her mascara running.

The curtains were drawn, casting the entire room in not-quite-black. A small beam of light attempted to pry one of the curtains open, but to no avail. On the floor were numerous magazines, all of them torn, many of the pages strewn about on the coffee table in a collage that had had meaning just days before, but now she could not recall what it had been. Also on the coffee table was the razor blade she had used to release the pain. The cuts on her arms were scabbing over, and her fingernails were bitten nearly to nothing.

“I want to be with you…but I can’t…they won’t let us be…be…” she trailed off in whispers that didn’t even make sense to herself. She cried. She’d been crying all morning, and most of the night. She cried until her eyes hurt, until she was sick at her stomach and had wanted to throw up. She cried until her eyes were swollen and her face hurt from staying so contorted. Every time she cried, she cut herself in places no one could see as long as she wore long clothing; the cutting brought her such exquisite anguish, and the pain helped. It fed back into a loop of beautiful agony. And yet she still cried. She cried whenever she thought about what her mother had said about the first cut she’d given herself. She cried whenever she thought about the fact that there was no going back now, not ever. Surgery couldn’t fix what she’d done, Dr. Matheson said as much.

She cried.

Earlier, when the sobs had subsided for a moment, she had gotten up and gone into the bathroom, and washed the mascara clean of her face. When she looked up into the slightly cracked mirror, she saw that she’d only managed to smear it more. She couldn’t even do that right.

She cried.

She paced about the apartment hugging herself, dressed in nothing but the purple panties with the teddy bears on them and the green hoodie her dad had given her for going off to college. “Just…just breathe,” she told herself. “J-just breathe…it’ll all pass soon. Like Dr. Nixon said. Just…just…” She couldn’t help it. Looking down at the picture brought on exquisite pain such as she had never felt before. Her mind was a wreck, and on some level she knew it.

“J-just…”

Where are the pills? She dropped the picture again, never knowing how it had gotten back into her hands in the first place, and started searching. The bottle was small and white with a blue top, with a suggested dosage written on the side.

Where? Where?! The tears spilled over again, the anger and frustration at herself for being so incompetent filled her. She could hear her mother’s accusations of losing the aripiprazole pills on purpose, she could actually hear the witch. Harleen Frances! she shrieked, as though she were there in the room with her. “What? Mom…Mommy?” she squeaked, as weak as a mouse. Harleen Frances! You give me those pills right now! You give them to me! Stop hiding them! You hear me?! Stop hiding them! “I’m not hiding anything, Mommy!” she shouted at the empty apartment.

HARLEEN! someone boomed.

Oh, God, it was her father. She backed across the room, quailing before a raised hand that wasn’t there. She sobbed uncontrollably as she stepped over old Styrofoam cups and empty pizza boxes. She had become a shut-in, and she knew it. She knew that she was what people called a recluse, a hermit, but she had never meant to be one. How did she get here? She had meant to be more. So much more. She had aspired to be a great doctor, like Dr. Bates, her boss at the asylum. She had almost made it, too. Almost, but not quite. She had gone to Gotham University, had kept her nose to the ground like her father said, and hadn’t messed with the boys.

HARLEEN!

“I didn’t! I didn’t mess with the boys, Daddy!” she cried. Somehow, the razor blade had wound up in her hands. She slashed at air, and then huddled in the corner, cutting herself on top of her right foot. The pain released endorphins, and it felt so, sooooooo gooooooooooooood.

HARLEEN! HARLEY! YOU LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT YOUR FATHER!

“Noooooooooooooooo!” she shouted back at the walls. “No! Go awayyyyyyyyy!”

She reached out for something to throw, and scooped up one of her bras, just lying on the floor amid candy wrappers and empty shipping boxes (What was I planning to ship?) and hurled the bra at the nothing in front of her.

HARLEEN!

The ants were back again, crawling in her skin. She couldn’t see them, or even feel them, but she knew they were there. He had seen them, too. Not her father, but her love. His eyes had always looked at her in that way, piercingly, seeing right through her, right to the soul. He had seen her, accepted her. Whenever they had talked, he had listened. He hadn’t just waited for his turn to speak—though, when he did speak he spoke at great length, but she loved that about him, so passionate—but he had actually heard her when she spoke.

YEAH, RIGHT! WHO WOULD ACCEPT YOU, HARLEY!

“He would,” she said, but it came out as a halfhearted whimper.

YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF, HARLEY! YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE TO BE SOMETHING! YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE! AND YOU BLEW IT!

After the booming sound of her father, there came the less loud but no less ear-piercing shriek of her mother. Look around you, Harleen! You’re alone! No man, no marriage! “You and Daddy told me to stay away from them,” she said. Where are my grandchildren? her mother went on, never to be contradicted. Look at what you’ve done to yourself! My God, just look! You did that to your stomach! Your own beautiful, beautiful stomach! You did that to yourself! She was talking about the deep, deep cuts Harley had given herself one night during a particularly bad attack. And for what? To pursue a man for the first time? Who’ll accept you like this now, Harley? Who?!

“He will,” she said. And this time, she kind of believed it. Harleen Frances had to think for a moment, but she remembered the former tenacity that had gotten her through criminal anthropology and her first few visits to state penitentiaries, where she had interviewed those in society who entertained their most base human desires without regard for what the moral majority believed in. It had taken a lot of guts to do that, and she had done well at it. But her professor…he had touched her one day in a way that Harleen hadn’t liked. Not after what her mother had done to her…and her father…her father…

DON’T YOU BLAME THIS ON ME! came the man’s defense.

“But you did, Daddy. You did start it,” she said. Unconsciously, she had dropped the razor blade and was now groping around on the floor for the framed picture. When her fingers found it, she drew it in closely, hugged it as though it were the most precious thing on earth, as though it were a shield against all dangers.

Harleen, you take that back about your father! Apologize to him! All we ever did for you was—!

“All you ever did was tell me to follow…follow…but you didn’t follow the same rules. They were just for me.” She drew herself deeper, deeper into a corner. “I did what you said…I went…I went to school and I made the grade…then…”

Then he happened. She didn’t even know when it had begun herself, their connection. She hadn’t been at the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane for more than a year when the prison had become home to the most terrifying terrorist in the country. Trained and skilled in the interview process necessary to utilize the PCL-R (psychopathic checklist-revised) as created by Dr. Robert Hare, and to make the most accurate predictions in order to determine if a subject was truly a psychopath, Harleen Frances had been one of only two in the maximum-security wing to speak with him outside of his cell, but still under the close watch of nearby guards, of course.

Harley bit at the inside of her cheek, and thought back to their first meeting. He’d stepped into Room 4, hobbled in shackles and followed closely by an entourage of guards and one nurse. His head was shaved bald—on the first day after his incarceration, he’d yanked some of it out to make a rope, and tried to strangle a guard who had walked too close to the bars at the county lockup. His face was cleared of all the makeup he had come to be known for, and though he wasn’t laughing, and wasn’t even smiling, he no less appeared humored by the whole situation.

When they sat him down, the first thing he said to her was, “Well, hello beautiful!”

“Hello, Mr. Doe,” she had replied. “I’m Dr. Quinzel, and I’ll be reviewing your case for the board and for the judge,” she had told him. “You and I will be having lots of these talks in the coming weeks. I’m assuming they told you?” He had said nothing, just kept his head down, looking up at her from under the hood of his eyes. “Can I have your name, please?” This wasn’t likely to work, but she had to try—they had no other name for him than what the thugs in the street that feared and revered him called him.

“You can call me anything you want, pumpkin,” he had said, slowly, thoughtfully.

Harley hadn’t smiled back then, but she did now. Her stomach became all fluttery when she thought of that day. Harley’s life had just started going sour around that time. Her father, having fought for his life against cancer for nearly five years, had finally lost the battle just three months before. And her mother…her mother had come to her screaming, demanding to know why she hadn’t been by her father’s bedside. When Harley had told her that she knew the reason as well as her father had, her mother had slapped her. “Still in denial?” Harley had shot back.

“Oh, and I guess you’re just the pinnacle of mental health, right?” her mother had retaliated, laughing.

Harley’s face had gone red with shame, the tears had come, though she had tried to stop them and had hated herself for showing the weakness. She couldn’t say anything back because, unfortunately, the witch had been right. For the last two years, Harley had been fighting her own battle, wrestling with demons she dared not speak about lest it cost her her job at Arkham, or the book deal she had with her publisher concerning her new work on sadistic super-sanity personality disorder.

The first time she had heard voices, it had been just after a dentist’s appointment. The drug they had given her for the pain had been pretty strong, and when the world had started to change in ways she couldn’t describe to anyone, she had called 911. The whispers had seemed to come from her carpet of all places, and the voices had said strange things, things she couldn’t even recall anymore. It had been blamed on the dosage she’d been given, and maybe that was only a catalyst, because three weeks later she had heard the voices again, and these she would remember for a long time. “Don’t forget to stop by the post office,” one of them said. Another one had argued back, “I don’t have any packages waiting for me! You go!” Another voice had said, “Ssshhh, she’s listening to us!” Back and forth like that, and this had happened on the freeway.

At first, Harley had pretended this wasn’t happening. She had gone to GCU and was a top student and was a well-respected doctor practicing her trade in one of the most difficult detention/prison centers in the United States, which proved her grit and merit. In fact, she had had urine flung at her by one inmate during a session, and had taken it in stride. However, once home, she had laughed. Just a light chuckle at first, but by the time she was going to bed she was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. Gasping for breath, she’d called 911 again.

It had been blamed on stress, and she had been given a two-week paid vacation to get her head straight again. And secretly, Harley had started writing prescriptions for drugs like aripiprazole and zotepine, using them herself while claiming they were for certain Arkham patients.

Then, on the day of her third session with Gotham’s most hated and feared criminal, everything had changed. The PCL-R was devised by Dr. Hare as having two main factors it searched for, aggressive narcissism and socially deviant lifestyle, and those factors were divvied up into subcategories. For instance, under aggressive narcissism there were the subcategories of a lack of a remorse and guilt, a grandiose sense of self-worth, and a glibness or superficial charm. Under the factor of socially deviant lifestyle, the subcategories included parasitic lifestyle, impulsiveness, and a lack of realistic, long-term goals.

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He didn’t have a name; no one had been able to determine who he was, or where he came from, which had added another degree of fear of this man in most who encountered him…but only intrigued Harley. His public defender had somehow managed to get him within Arkham’s walls, moving for a criminally insane plea. Inside Arkham Asylum, he had been enrolled in various programs meant to assist rehabilitation, none of which really stuck with him. One of them was a sign language class, something he barely paid attention to while one of Arkham’s instructors tried to get him to participate.

On the day that Harley felt everything had changed for her, she had been exploring the subcategory of cunning/manipulation in the interview process, when the scar-faced man, now known as Patient 217, looked at her and said, “If someone, anyone, had just loved you…”

Harley had looked up at him sharply. “I’m sorry…what?”

“Hm?” Patient 217 had looked up from a spot he’d been staring at on the table between them.

“What did you just say?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You just said something. Something about me being loved.”

“Sorry, pumpkin. You must be hearing things.”

“I’m not hearing things. You said something. What was it?”

He raised an eyebrow, and even the guards in the room glanced at her, uncertain of what was taking place. “I see. So, you’re in here, too.”

“In where?”

“Here. The asylum.”

Harley had smirked. “We both are. We all are.”

“Ain’t it the truth,” he said. His words had come out slowly, his eyes now moving down to have a look at her legs, and something happened to him. He had the look of surprise on his face, as though now seeing her for the first time. As though…as though…

As though he was actually seeing something in me. It was appreciation she had seen, Harley was sure of it because she had come to discern and interpret microexpressions on the faces of patients. It was as if he had spotted true potential in her. Harley had seen Patient 217 give a slight, approving nod.

In their next discussion, he had winked at her and smiled, saying, “I think we know where this is going?” It was a question, not a statement, and it had intrigued her. She’d made a note. While she did, he added, “In our first discussion, you asked for my name.” She looked up at him. “You can call me Jay. But only you, pumpkin. Only you.”

Presently, Harley looked at her hands. She was trembling.

The TV was filled with all of the pre-trial footage, all of the lead-ups to the day when proceedings would finally begin. Jury selection was finally finished, and there were backup jurors just in case. The new DA, Raymond Cahill, was expected to have a slam dunk case up until three weeks ago, when a couple of respected Arkham doctors (who Harley knew personally) had suddenly gone off of Harley’s final analysis of Patient 217, now officially declared John Doe, and was trying to help the defense prove that the defendant was, in fact, insane. Indeed, he was so sane, that he was insane.

I helped, she thought, still crying. I helped save him from the death penalty. That was me. That was all me. Despite the fact that she had been sent home with pay yet again, Harley’s good work still stood with the officials at Arkham.

Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel’s work was still to be respected. Her book on sadistic personality disorder, due out later this year, focused an entire chapter on psychopaths and their behavioral mannerisms. She had identified differences between male and female psychopaths, something that past researchers hadn’t really cared to look into because modern psychology was notoriously gender blind. In its beginning, Harley had argued, the field of psychology had been overwhelmingly patriarchal, developing a tradition of androcentrism, and throughout Western history femininity had been seen as inherently deviant. It was a way of just tossing all studies in female mental problems into one big lump without sufficiently studying them. Men were seen as important members of society that needed to be cured, while women were commonly seen as lost causes, naturally crazy. Indeed, the word hysteria itself was derived from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα (hystera). The concept was that old.

Psychology had largely been a study of similarly educated, white, middle-class males. Therefore, she had argued, all mental problems were addressed through that one single lens, never looking at the individual needs of sexes or races. Dubiously, feminism may have prevented the revolution in psychology that was necessary to treat individuals on an individual basis—after all, with it becoming increasingly unpopular to say that women were in any way different than men, and could do everything they could do, who would be brave enough to bring that up?

Harley had. And she had almost at once seen vitriol spewed at her from women’s rights groups. Men, even those in her college classes, had espoused interest in her topic at first, but she had caught some of them by the water cooler discussing her theories on how the lack of love and depth that came with any meaningful relationship played a major part in most, if not all, of the mental health problems women faced, and they had chuckled, saying things like, “That’s just a clinical way of saying they’re all crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” Harley said presently. “My argument…was sound…” And it had been, she felt. She had pointed to the problems in men with the need for men to dominate, to not be humiliated, to be the alpha male. She believed all other problems in men stemmed from this, and that, except in the cases where some sort of head trauma had actually physically changed the brain, they merely needed to be allowed to exercise some kind of control over something, a therapy she was pushing for and had seen some results in her preliminary findings. Likewise, women with mental problems could be treated better by therapy where they were allowed to genuinely form a bond with someone or some pet, rather than treated with pills or standardized tests that had been mostly perfected by men for men.

IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK I NEEDED, HARLEY! A DAMN DOCTOR GIVING ME A PUPPY TO HAVE CONTROL OVER? YOU THINK THAT WOULD’VE HELPED ME?

“Everybody…needs someone…”

She looked down at the framed picture. The tears started coming again. She cried until her abdomen cramped, and she went into convulsions on the floor, writhing on the carpet, her arms pushing over stacks of magazines and newspapers that had only grown and grown. Each day she had gone down to the supermarket in her neighborhood and purchased another copy of the Gotham City Times, sometimes five or six of the same copy, and a few fashion magazines that she enjoyed tearing open and cutting out the faces and putting hers and his in the place of well-dressed celebrities at a red carpet event.

The ceiling fan overhead was on its slowest setting, and she looked up into it, wondering if the strange whirlpool she saw was real. Suddenly, Harley was upside down and falling into the fan, falling into the blades of some large blender. She peed herself. Finally, she rolled over onto one side, knowing that this all mustn’t be real. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she knew that she was still Harleen Frances Quinzel, and that her old self would have been able to identify her symptoms as severe paranoid schizophrenia before recommending treatment at a hospital right away.

Then, she had a thought. If they lock me up…they might put me in a cell close to him…

But no, that wouldn’t be possible. She would be in the women’s wing, and he would remain in solitary confinement under “no human contact” status. They had given him that status after their last session, the eighth and final one, where he had produced a small, sharpened toothbrush out of nowhere and lunged at her. No one had known where it had been hidden on his person, or how it had gotten to him in the first place, but in that moment, as Mr. Jay had come across the table, hand almost at her neck, Harley had smiled. He’s coming for me, she thought. Just before he could plunge the shiv into her neck, the guards had slammed into him and flung him against the far wall. Mr. Jay wasn’t a natural fighter, but he was a wily, unpredictable scrapper, his arms as nimble as an octopus’ and the shiv ripping into one of the guards’ cheeks.

Harley had experienced an unusual calm during what they had called “an attack.” But she hadn’t believed that he truly meant to kill her. It wasn’t in his nature to kill her. Anybody else he would have, but not her. He told me to call him Jay. He had been coming to assert his masculine authority, probably to make an example out of her, to act out his natural aggression and show her that he shouldn’t be treated in such a demeaning way. And she had been willing to give him the therapy he needed.

He told me to call him Jay.

The smile she had given him as he came at her had been fleeting. She hadn’t even known she’d done it. Videos of their session played back later revealed it, and for a moment she had been startled to see herself acting in such a way, just sitting there, smiling. A couple of her coworkers had asked her if she was really smiling in that moment, and she had lied, saying, “I think I was just so startled.” Not that that made any sense, but it forced them to shrug and drop it.

That night, fear had crept in. When she had thought back on it, she realized that she might be having stronger reactions to stress, that the previous bouts of hallucinations and alien thoughts might truly be a sign that the medication wasn’t working. So far, none of the doctors at Arkham knew what she had been hiding. They couldn’t know. If they did, they would suspend her indefinitely. After that, she would have her license to practice medicine revoked. And then I’d never see him again. Can’t have one “crazy” person giving therapy to another.

What was it about him that attracted her? What was it specifically? Her old self responded, and the answer was simple. He doesn’t laugh at me. The realization came on her like the dawn. It was something she hadn’t even thought to put down in her notes. He laughed at everybody else, even laughed while the guards took him down and busted his lip…even while he killed others to make his point…and he argued with me at times about the questions I was asking, or sometimes just went dead silent…but he never laughed at me.

That was remarkable, considering Patient 217 was known to chuckle even after being put under heavy sedation. He never laughed at me. And he told me to call him Jay. And he listened to me.

Suddenly, she heard a voice. But this time it wasn’t the voice of her mother or her father, nor creepy little whispers that emerged from the walls. It was his voice, crisp and clear and frank and non-patronizing. “You’re in a hole right now,” he said to her. It was something he had said to her during their fifth psych evaluation. “You, me, everyone. Nobody denies it. Everybody complains. So we all know something’s wrong with the system, right? So, while we’re in this hole, we’re all trying to think of ways to climb out. Most people shout down each other, trying to be heard, trying to give their ideas on how to get out of the hole instead of just turning their backs on one another and climbing out themselves, as a group of individuals. While they all argue, and offer drugs and religion and science and psychology and humanitarian aid and laws and rules as a means to get out of the hole, they never actually get anything done, do they? They…just…argue.” He had smirked at that, she remembered now as she heard him speaking to her from across the city. “But, every so often, there is an individual, a Rogue, who turns his—or her—back on the rest of them, looks at the immense walls surrounding them on all sides of the giant hole, and says, ‘Ya know, I bet I could climb that.’ Then, one foothold at a time, the Rogue starts climbin’ on out. Now, they’ll all shout at the Rogue, tell him or her to come back down, and sometimes they have the best interests of the Rogue in mind—after all, he might fall down and get hurt. Others scream at the Rogue to come down because they’re afraid he or she might accomplish what all of ’em couldn’t together. Escape.” She could feel his breath now on the back of her neck. “The Rogue’s life is lonely, because he or she climbs alone. But eventually, ya get so high up that the screams of the people below become a general noise; ya can’t even make out the individual arguments anymore, they all sound the same. On the climb up, the Rogue may have chance to meet other Rogues similarly minded, and those meetings can be surprising when these two peas in a pod come together. Sometimes, they go their separate ways. Other times, they are partners for life, and no man can separate them.” And then, Mr. Jay was there, standing right in front of her, free as a bird and without any cuffs on his wrists or ankles, dressed in a gorgeous tux with a bright red rose on his lapel. “Can you escape, Harleen? Are you a Rogue, or just another useless screamer down there in all that noise?”

He called me Harleen. And he told me to call him Jay.

A long time ago, Harley had realized that there were many different ways to love. Her father had loved her very much. Too much. As had her mother. Their relationship had been abusive. Her father had been too controlling, just like her mother. A relationship couldn’t last with both partners struggling for the position of alpha dog. One had to rule, the other had to nurture, and they both had to be willing to accept their roles.

She looked down at the framed picture in her hand. The headline was from the Gotham City Journal-Constitution, and it was of John Doe being moved from Arkham to the jail that immediately adjoined the courthouse. Bulletproof vests had been slung all over him, as had a hood that covered his head. The photographer who had taken this shot had gotten an angle so that the throng of people being held back by police could be seen—they had come out in droves, the uncaring creatures, haranguing him and one person even attempting to hurl an orange at him. I bet he really needs someone right now…he’s so alone…

ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?!

It was only her father now. Her mother had retreated somewhere.

Can you escape, Harleen? Can you climb out of the hole, too?

She smiled at that. Amid all the tears and the anguish, she smiled. He called me Harleen. And he told me to call him Jay.

* * *

ACROSS THE CITY from where one young woman was tormented by invisible demons, another young lady looked up at a real one. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to go to the wedding rehearsal tomorrow. She was surprisingly calm as she looked down at her own blood in her hands.

Theresa Fuller’s head had suffered serious trauma from the blow. She hadn’t even seen what had been used, and she was pretty sure this was a dream. Whereas Harley Quinzel was facing hallucinations and thinking they were real, Theresa was going through something very real and believed that it wasn’t.

I’ve got the wedding rehearsal tomorrow, she thought. The dark figure stood over her now, probably to hit her again. She was far too dazed to understand that this was probably the end of her life. The rag of chloroform that was pressed against her nose and lips sank her even more deeply into the dream. There, she saw her husband, Daniel, waiting for her at the altar and tapping his watch. “You’re late, sweetie,” he said, and smiled at her.

Theresa woke up only once. She was on the floor of a moving vehicle, her mouth gagged and her hands bound to her feet in rope so tight it bit into her wrists and was cutting circulation. Across from her, another young girl was also bound and gagged, and completely passed out.

She slipped right back into the dream, where Daniel was slipping on the ring at the ceremony. She could almost smell the aroma coming from the many flower arrangements all around her, and Dana, her niece, was in the front pew behaving badly, but it caused everyone to smile at her because everyone knew she was a rascal.

This was a much better dream than the nightmare her tormentor had in store for her.